Butch Cloned in Weird Timeslip Incident

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Note: I wanted to add this to the Butch page as a bug/exploit but wasn't sure - admin advice please!

This happened in my daughters playthrough. Broken Steel was loaded and with a very good character she completed the main story line by repairing the purifier, all well and good.

Afterwards she noticed that her follower Butch was missing. After searching in vain in all the usual haunts (Muddy Rudder) and backtracking to recent locations Butch could not be found.

I was asked to help and I used the player.moveto console command to take me to Butch.

This is where it gets weird. Her character was taken to Butch who was waiting for her at the purifier at a "time" before its repair. The Brotherhood scribes were not in residence and there was none of the extra facilities installed. We didn't want to continue the game like this as it would probably have messed up her game progress.

We checked he wasn't there in "realtime" by going to the purifier normally. He wasn't there.

As a work around and an attempt to circumvent this "timeslip" I did the following:

Fired Butch, watched him leave and waited 24 hours for him to make his way back to Rivet City.

Used the player.moveto console command to jump to Moira Brown in megaton.

Fast travelled to the purifier and established I was in the correct time sequence.

Visited the Muddy rudder and found two Butches!!

The original Butch was present with all the equipment he was carrying for my daughters character and there was a cloned Butch in his original tunnel rat outfit.
Voila!

I cloned Butch!

The Butch clone had the ID ff0010ba which is different to the standard Butch ID of 002a4e8. Cloned Butch followed when original Butch was ordered and fought with us. However at some aprarrently random point the cloned Butch would turn hostile and require to be killed. In this case original Butch joined in the killing.